Let’s look at all the ways rental housing is important to our island society.

Traditionally, when young couples start out their lives together, they need starter homes. In most cases these are rentals. If we want the next generation to stay in Hawaii, we need to provide enough rental housing for them.

We have no cheap homes in Hawaii because we have not built enough housing over the last 30 years and we do not import enough prefab and mobile homes. Our low-cost housing starts at around $450,000. For all those couples who never find a way to purchase a home, rentals are necessary to support their journeys together with their growing families and into their senior years.

Also, how many homeless people have limited income but could afford to move into rentals if we had a larger price selection of rentals available?

Recently we learned that our hospitals depend on traveling nurses (more than 500) to provide care at all levels. These traveling nurses require a place to rent while they are here on their contracts.

At our colleges and universities, thousands of Hawaii students and out-of-state students need rental housing near their schools. The economic impact from all out-of-state students is a billion-dollar business. If we want to continue to diversify our economy by adding more out-of-state students, they will need more housing/rentals.

Today, on Oahu, when you see your bill at a hotel, there are four taxes: Two for Oahu — the general excise tax (GET) surcharge for rail and the county transient accommodations tax (TAT) — and two for the state (the GET and state TAT). How many millions of dollars are lost each year as the owners of illegal rentals fail to charge and pass on these taxes to the state and county? Would you file rental taxes to the state and county if you knew your business was illegal?

In Hawaii, we support public education through state taxes, mostly our GET. Every time a visitor stays at an illegal rental and the owner fails to collect and pay the appropriate state taxes, our state education system is cheated. If we are going to have one statewide school district, we need to collect the taxes that support that system.

When the visitors who are using our illegal rentals move to legal rentals, hotels, condos or timeshares, we all benefit.

Today, we have hundreds of properties throughout Hawaii that are zoned for an additional home; however, the cost of building is too high so the land is vacant. In order to develop a new home on these lands, it is now possible to bring in prefab homes from the mainland. These factory homes can pass our building department rules. Today, both Matson and PASHA have roll-on and roll-off ability to handle prefab homes. These lower-priced homes can add to our inventory of homes and rentals. These prefab homes may also give new Department of Hawaiian Home Lands lessees another less-expensive way to build.

In our excellent community college system, the culinary school at Kapiolani Community College started a restaurant to help train their culinary students. We could do the same at the Honolulu Community College carpentry program. The carpentry students need thousands of hours to become journeymen. The state could help these young carpenters build prefab homes here on Oahu. If the program is successful, the new homes could help lower the cost of new homes and increase our pool of rental inventory.

Our young people, our young families, our seniors, our homeless, our hospitals, our students and our school system all need more legal rental housing available throughout our islands.

Hawaii Kai resident John Brizdle is former co-owner of E Noa Tours and The Waikiki Trolley.